THE BASS SAXOPHONE (7 page)

But later, sitting in the darkened auditorium where the Cultural Guide was showing a film (after several vain attempts to make the projector work, and only after the silent fellow, who was perhaps a factory foreman, had taken over, adjusting a screw here and there, and the projector had rattled to a start), a film that was precisely calculated for the maximum possible nonentertainment (and yet the people were entertained, because it was a movie and the projector was rattling away behind their backs and they were here to spend a week enjoying themselves), and as the room vanished in the smoky dusk I took Emöke’s hand, warm and soft, and because tomorrow was the last day of our stay at the recreation center and I had to do something — or at
any rate I succumbed to instinct or to that social obligation to seduce young women on vacation, single, married, or widowed — I asked her to come outside for a stroll. She acquiesced, I got up, she got up too and in the flickering of the projector I glimpsed the schoolteacher’s gaze following her as she left the room by my side and went out into the night light of the August evening outside the building.

We walked through the night, along the white road between the fields, bordered by cherry trees and white milestones, the sweet smell of the blossoms and the countless voices of tiny creatures in the grass and the trees. I took Emöke’s hand, she didn’t object, I wanted to talk but I couldn’t think of anything to talk about. There was nothing I might say, since my conscience kept me from opening the dam that held back my usual August evening rhetoric (irresistible to any lone woman on vacation providing the speaker is sufficiently young and not overly ugly) because I once again realized that it was a matter of life and death and that she was different, deeper, more inaccessible than other girls. I merely stopped and said Emöke, she stopped too, and said Yes? and then I took her in my arms or I moved as if to take her in my arms, but she slipped out of the incomplete embrace. I tried again, I put my arm around her slender, very firm waist and drew her toward me but she
disengaged herself, turned and walked quickly away. I hurried after her, took her hand and again she didn’t object, and I said Emöke, don’t be angry. She shook her head and said, I’m not angry. But really, I insisted. Really, she said. It’s just that I’m disappointed. Disappointed? I asked. That’s right, replied Emöke. I’d begun to think you were different after all, but you aren’t, you’re just a prisoner of your body like all men. Don’t be angry at me for it, Emöke, I said. I’m not angry, she answered, I know that men are usually like that. It’s not your fault. You’re still imperfect. I thought you were on the way, but you aren’t, not yet. Not quite. And what about you, Emöke, I said, have you entirely given up everything physical already? Yes, replied Emöke. But you’re so young, I said. Don’t you want to marry again? She shook her head. Men are all the same, she said. I thought that I might find someone, some friend that I could live with, but just as a friend, you know, nothing physical, it disgusts me — no, I don’t feel contempt for it, I know that physical people need it, there’s nothing essentially bad about it, but it’s derived from badness, from imperfection, from the body, from matter, and man progresses only by reaching toward the spirit. But now I’ve stopped believing that I’ll ever be able to find a friend like that, so I’d rather be alone, with my little girl. She spoke, and her face was like milk, lovely in the
light of the stars and the moon and the August night. I said, You won’t find a friend like that. Not you. Not unless it’s someone like that consumptive gardener of yours, the one who used to lend you those books because he wasn’t capable of anything else — Don’t talk about him like that, she interrupted me, don’t be like that, please. But Emöke, really, I said, don’t you ever long for someone — I mean the way girls do when they’re as young as you and as pretty? Do you honestly think you could find a friend who wouldn’t want that of you unless he were a poor wretch, somehow disabled or crippled? Oh, but it’s not a matter of longing, Emöke replied. Everyone has temptation, but one must overcome it. But why? I said. What for? Longing needn’t be exclusively and solely physical. It can be an expression of love, a yearning for oneness. Longing is at the very source of existence, insofar as people are born of love. You love your little daughter, don’t you? And don’t you want to have any more children? You could have them, I’m sure of that. Do you want to give all that up, voluntarily? Emöke echoed, Give it up? Everything is the will of God, she said. But is God standing in your way? I asked. He gave you so much, more than other women. You are young, pretty, healthy, all men aren’t like that first husband of yours, not all marriages are based on reasons like yours. There are men who love their wives for more than just the physical side of marriage,
even though that too is a part of love — But it’s not a part of true love, she exclaimed. True love is love of the soul. But how would you have children then? I asked. Or are you against children? Oh, no, she said, children are innocent and need love. But they’re burdened with sin, and woman must suffer for that sin when she brings them into the world. That doesn’t answer my question, I said, and besides, childbirth can be painless nowadays. But are you in favor of children being born at all? Wouldn’t it be better just to give it up and not keep bringing new objects of sin or whatever into the world, new beings burdened by matter and physicality, because that’s what most people are. Wouldn’t it be better to let people die out? No, she retorted quickly. It’s God’s will that they live. In His infinite goodness, God wants all people to find salvation. And all of them will, one day. But what do you mean by “all”? I said. And when will they all find salvation? Wouldn’t it be better to stop now, so that “all” would be “all those now living in the world”? No, no, no, she said. No, you don’t understand. You’re the one that doesn’t understand, I replied. You don’t understand your own self, you’re full of inconsistencies. You haven’t resolved a single thing for yourself, let alone thought about the logical flaws in your mystical system. Oh, what’s logic! she said. Just a subject in school. No, it’s
everything, I answered. It’s your appealing to me terribly, it’s … my liking you a lot, and it’s my … Don’t say it, she whispered, ridding me of the need to pronounce that fatal set of words which in her case could not be taken back, which would carry its full meaning and not be just a vague promise to be broken or simply forgotten, because it was she, Emöke, that story, that legend, that poem, the past, the future.

We were standing in front of the illuminated entrance to the recreation center. She stared at the dark shadows of the trees against the night, and the expression in her eyes was no longer that of a forest animal but of a woman fighting off the primal damnation that is the root of her feelings of inferiority and the source of her life-giving force, and that can in one red flash blind thought and reason although it may end up in — well, in all that painful business and possibly the shame of being an unwed mother and the worry and the risk of getting fat and losing one’s charms and one’s life and everything. But that damnation overcomes a woman all the same, and she gives in the way she’s always given in and always will give in, and it’s of this damnation that a new human being is born. Good night, said Emöke, reaching out to shake my hand. Emöke, I said, think about it. Good night, she said and disappeared inside the hotel. I caught
a glimpse of her slender legs on the stairway and then nothing. For a while I stood in front of the hotel and at last I went upstairs to my room.

The schoolteacher was lying in bed, his pants, shirt, shorts, socks, everything neatly hung up to air along the back of the chair and the foot of the bed. He was awake and he measured me with a mean look. “Well?” he said. I didn’t answer him, I sat down on my bed and began to undress. The schoolteacher watched me with eyes like two dried-up black figs. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, “don’t tell me you’re going to sleep with a hard-on!” Aw, nuts, I said, turned off the light and lay down in bed. For a while there was silence. Then the schoolteacher said, “Seems to me that you’re a dud. That you don’t know how to handle women. Admit it!” Good night, I said. Beyond the window a rooster crowed, aroused from his night’s sleep by a bad dream.

At the farewell party, I drank red wine and watched Emöke who was wearing a close-fitting summer dress with a white collar, her arms bare, dressed like any other attractive girl of her age. When the vacationers saw I was just sitting there drinking, they gradually grew bolder and asked her to dance (they hadn’t dared before, because according to the rules of vacationers she and I comprised a
couple, and such a couple is a holy thing to these one- or two-week collectives), and so Emöke was constantly on the dance floor, one time with the Cultural Guide, who was only half sober, once with the hot-shot, who had given up sulking but hadn’t quite given up hope of living it up in what was left of his vacation (specifically with one of the four or five available girls in the group), once with the paunchy manager of the clothing store, whose pudgy wife observed her with the loving gaze of matrons who would never think of being jealous but who view young girls full of erotic charm as sort of mystical sisters in the delusive destiny of womankind, once with the leader of the jazz band, who didn’t dance or even put down his fiddle at any other time during the evening, and with several others, and I sat over my third glass of red wine, for I was possessed by the strange indecisiveness of a man who feels a sense of responsibility but is still too much a man of his times not to have to fight off indifference, frivolity, irresponsibility. Emöke, the wine rose slowly to my head, Emöke on the dance floor looked altogether different from the five or six other girls on the dance floor; she was the most graceful, youthful yet ripe, without the imperfection of the seventeen-year-old face that hasn’t yet made up its mind whether to trade in the loveliness of childhood for the shallow and uninteresting beauty of adulthood or for the charm
of youth, the female charm of the age of courtship and the first natural swell of fertility; she laughed like they did, but hers was a deep alto laugh, and she danced with the natural assurance of women who know how to dance the way birds know how to sing or bees to make a honeycomb, the body of a dancer curving under the thin summer fabric of her August dress; I looked at her and a wave of longing and fondness for that desperate soul and, fortified by the wine, a longing for the body and the breasts swelled inside me until finally the wine which man substitutes for woman’s damnation (risking fatherhood, matrimony, his career, his whole life for the deception of a brief moment) released me from all bonds of reason and wisdom, and when I saw the schoolteacher, his eyes lit up like those of a witch’s torn cat, emerge from somewhere in the dark recesses of the hall and ask Emöke to dance and saw him dance with her, pressing close to her body, half a head shorter than she, a satyr with a satyr’s lecherous face but none of the mythic poetry, I rose and broke onto the dance floor with a drunkard’s energetic gait and cut in and took Emöke away from the schoolteacher. I hadn’t seen her since morning. I had spent the whole day in my room; the schoolteacher had taken off but I had stayed in, dozing and thinking about that girl, about all the possibilities and my own insecurity and indecisiveness, but now I was with her, holding her around
the waist as I had last night only she wasn’t pulling away from me this time, and I had the wine in my head and her eyes had lost their mystical mildness, the cloistered resignation of anaesthetized passions, and they were the eyes of a Hungarian girl, like stars over the
puszta
, and the inner rhythm that yesterday had made the keys of the old piano tremble now flowed through her slender legs and was transformed at her hips into the circular motion of a prelude to love.

The schoolteacher withdrew to a table with a small glass of white wine and wet his muzzle in that sourish liquid of village dances that infuses the stench of lust pantingly relieved with hot whispers and abandoned cries in fragrant orchards behind taverns or, when there isn’t enough tail to go around, that simply goes the way of all liquids, flowing into the stinking tarred troughs of caustic smelling tavern toilets and from there to cesspools and from there into the earth which purifies the liquid and transforms it back into the crystal flow of the spring in the valley. He raised his heavy, mean, bloodshot eyes to the dance floor and followed me with the resentful stare of an outsider as I danced with the Hungarian girl; he knew I was young and single and an intellectual from Prague, one who had mastered that vague miscellany of information that evokes the impression of erudition he too was striving to evoke, and so at night, in private,
he would rail contemptuously against yokels who get together at recreation centers, dumb-ass shopgirls, mechanics who barely know how to sign their names, and it never occurred to him that he himself was capable of little more than signing his own name in the heavy-handed calligraphy that was a throwback to the days of the Austrian Empire, that he didn’t know much more than the four rudimentary operations of arithmetic, the solution of a quadratic equation and a brief review of Czech history (memorized a long time ago by rote in the so-called heroical-patriotic form of idealistic bourgeois stories about heroes and national spirit, and now confused with a Marxism he had failed to grasp), how to tell the male blossom from the female on a few plants and how to classify the common fauna of this planet into mammals, birds, and invertebrates, but he didn’t know a blessed thing about Dollo’s Law of Irreversibility or the amazing evolution of turtles’ shells, or the semi-legendary archaeopteryx; he wouldn’t believe you if you told him that the brontosaurus had two nerve centers in its spine and hence two brains, and if he did happen to half believe you he’d transform it into a crude joke. And yet he could stand in front of runny-nosed children at their schooldesks, and with an expression of extreme erudition lecture them how, according to an English scholar named Darwin, man is descended from the monkey, and over the
years he had grown used to feeling intellectually superior to the six- to eleven-year-old pupils around him, to the weary farmers who dropped in to the tavern on Saturdays for a drink, and village blacksmiths whose hands, accustomed to the weight of iron sledgehammers, were unable to sign their names in the box marked “parental signature” in their children’s weekly reports without smearing the page with axle grease and without the uneven signature creeping beyond the narrow printed rectangle; he never considered that it is just as hard, if not harder, and just as worthy, if not worthier, and probably far more beautiful to be able to control the delicate mechanism of a precision lathe, to turn out silvery shining bolts and nuts, to observe the milky flow of oils and other fluids that flush and lubricate the cutters and drills, than it is to scratch out the natural expressions of childhood with red ink, molding them into uniform monstrosities of correct grammar and acceptable style, and to implant in children’s souls such deep-rooted subconscious convictions as “i before e except after c,” yet he did know that my erudition (even though it was only a glorified nonerudition, the kind of intellectual fraud committed by ninety-nine percent of all high school graduates with the exception of the one percent that become theoretical physicists, astronomers, paleontologists, paleographers, chemists and experimental pathologists) was greater, more impressive
than his — as was my suit, made by a good Prague tailor, while his pudgy body, half a head shorter than Emöke’s slouched in a Sunday suit of a style beyond style that had never even been in style, aggravated by a necktie in that eternal pattern of indeterminate slots and slashes; and so with his baleful, helpless eyes, eyes of the weak, the outcast, the handicapped, he followed me around the dance floor as I danced with Emöke.